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kkleiner writes "Bojan Nemec from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia recently presented his skiing robot at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). The robot won't be winning skiing records anytime soon and its usefulness as a ski instructor or in any other capacity seems quite a ways off. Nonetheless, the videos of this robot taking a ride down the ski slopes are well worth watching. In case you are wondering, this is a completely different robot than the one Slashdot covered earlier."

Pretty much what I thought too. I can't understand why these guys made their robot so high off the ground. I'd have thought a really low design would work better. Then they could use a weight on a retractable arm mounted to sides to steer -When you want to turn left push the weight to the left side, causing friction to increase on the left and Ski to turn towards that side.
They should have been thinking of Tobagganing or Sledding instead of "Ski-ing".

Compare this simple robot to the high-tech Japanese one [physorg.com] covered by Slashdot earlier. Makes one realize the difference in research money available to the Slovenians versus to the Japanese.

What are you talking about? The sex part of the sexbot is easy, they've even combined it with a flashlight (was going to put a link, but I'm at work, and besides, ew.)

It's the -talking- to the sexbot after the sex that needs work. What are you going to talk about while you're smoking? The battery charge left? Polynomials? Sure they could program the sexbot to tell you you were the best he/she's ever had, but you'd want more variety after a little while: they need a hobby. One hobby? Skiing. If you're a skiier you probably like to talk about skiing after sex, and it will be really obvious he/she is lying if the sexbot can't actually ski. Plus maybe you like to have sex on the lift. If the sexbot can't go down the hill, it's not going to be able to go down on you on the way up.

Disclaimer: the above really wrote itself. It might sound like I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, but I don't. I don't know if that's to or against my credit that I'm not actually trying to advance the sex toy industry, but it's not the case, I was just making a joke and then it started sounding a little too believable...

> It might sound like I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, but I don't.

And yet, you are surprisingly fluent in the small details involved in both design and execution. Fair to say where there's smoke....there's chaffing of the loins - just don't get too excited over the in
's & out's, ok?

It may be smooth enough going 2-3km/h, but will it be smooth/stable enough to hit 50-60km/h* down some steep slopes? I highly doubt it, most humans aren't stable enough when moving that fast because of reaction delay's and such - unless robotics and gyroscopes make huge leaps forward very quickly I can't see this happening.

In the coming Robot Apocalypse (tm) I was planning to flee to a snowier clime, knowing full well that my bipedal and wheeled adversaries would not be able to easily pursue me. Indeed, I had visions of blasting the mechanical horrors with my trusty shotgun as they slipped, tumbled and performed various pratfalls, or otherwise became bogged down in the glorious white stuff. I counted on them becoming flustered and immobile, rather like a Dalek faced with a steep flight of stairs. But no! You had to go and

To me, it looks like the robot is focused on keeping the acceleration due to gravity between the skis. I know it must be considering the centripetal force, Yet it does not seem capable of 'hanging it out there', in a turn steep enough to support an acc due to gravity that doesn't point between the skis. I think this is part of what's holding it back, and if so it would mean a snowboarding robot wouldn't work as well with the same tech.

From the video it appears that it missed the last gate. It seems to identify a gate, maneuver around it and try to counter back to identify the next gate which seems like the logic you would use. Its hard to see what looks like the last gate as there appears to be a person standing behind it and maybe that is what threw it off, but it looks like it over steered on the second to last gate and could not identify the last gate because of it.